Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is More Than a Fancy Rolodex

The right customer relationship management (CRM) solution is much more than a fancy rolodex or a repository for important customer data.  It can strengthen communication and collaboration between your marketing and sales team, as well as provide valuable insight into your marketing and sales efforts.  If you have been considering introducing a CRM solution to your team, here are three ways to improve your implementation process.

1. Get the team involved:  Adoption rates are usually much better when you have input from the people who will be tasked with using the new business solution.  Set up a meeting with your sales and marketing teams and talk about what they would want in their CRM solution.  You can also show them how the solution offers automation, making common tasks easier and quicker, as well as how the solution can provide greater insight into their customer needs.
2. Create a strategy:  You can use the information gathered from the sales and marketing teams, as well as corporate strategic goals to find the CRM solution that fits your company’s unique needs.  You want to find a solution that matches the way you work and that can help you monitor business goals.  Once you find a solution, you can develop a deployment and training schedule.  Don’t underestimate the power of training. If your team is unable to use the solution properly, then you will end up with missing, erroneous, or skewed data.
3. Review and re-evaluate often:  Don’t rest too long after implementation and training is over.  Go back to your teams and keep tabs on your solution to make sure that everyone is using the new CRM solution to its fullest.  Ask if there are problems or things that need to be changed to make the solution better or easier to use.  Almost no implementations are perfect right from the get go. Also, make sure that your IT team performs the occasional updates and other common maintenance activities.  Your solution should be flexible enough to match your business needs today, and be easily changed as business needs change.

The right CRM solution is more than just a simple repository for customer data; it’s a way to encourage communication and collaboration amongst your teams.  When everyone is working together, customers receive the attention and quick response that elicits superior customer satisfaction.  Contact OTT, Inc. for more information about implementing CRM to improve collaboration between your sales and marketing teams that will generate the unsurpassed customer service that keeps customers coming back.

By OTT, Inc., a Microsoft Dynamics Partner out of Minnesota